23
Real Gardens with Imaginary Toads: Domestic
Fantasy
Louisa Smith
Children’s literature of the fantastic suggests either high drama—battles between the
powers of lightness and darkness—or stuffed animals capering about a nursery world
after hours. Generally the chief human actors in these fantasies are children imbued
with the key attribute of being parent free; parents, after all, would get in the way by
providing cautions which would inhibit the child characters from stepping through
wardrobes or time travelling, or worse, chuckling indulgently when children mention
that their stuffed animals talk. Introducing fantasy into children’s real worlds, making
the unbelievable believable while the central characters are surrounded by everyday
settings and activities, takes a skilled author. An intact family unit almost defeats the
concept of fantasy, but it commonly points out the fundamental conflict between fantastic
and rational views of the world, or between (stereotypically) the child’s view and the
adult’s.
Domestic settings have been traditional in fairy tales, where ‘magic’ operates in
everyday life to right a wrong. Parents—or, frequently, step-parents—in such tales can
be the cause of the problem, even if the setting is some remote kingdom in some remote
time. However, when a book is set in an actual place, and in an actual time, with a real
family, then the suspension of disbelief is harder to achieve. Considerations such as how
observant (or sympathetic) are the parents, how siblings react, how the magic is
introduced, and what results are allowed in the real world when the fantasy departs
enter the picture. When the fantasy occurs largely or completely in a ‘secondary’ world,
such as C.S.Lewis’s Narnia, or L.Frank Baum’s Oz, or A.A.Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood
where links with normality are relatively insignificant or irrelevant, or make their point
peripherally, the author has the luxury of creating a world complete with its own rules,
borrowing only that reality necessary to relate the action to children. Fantasy set more
solidly in ‘reality’ has to be more circumspect; it may be given an ambiguous status, as
in Mary Norton’s Borrowers sequence (from 1952) with its complex frame of hearsay
evidence; or it may simply be discounted as a dream, as in John Masefield’s The Box of
Delights (1935), or it may take on a mystical status as in Lucy Boston’s The Children of
Green Knowe (1954).
The fantastic mode in domestic life can be employed to solve real problems
imaginatively or to provide an escape (as in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark (1971)), or
to confront child protagonists with situations which require brave and intelligent
responses. Rather than being a means of imaginative liberation for the child, it can be,